Either I'm too old for this stuff or the wrong gender.

Friday, January 24, 2003; 1:07 PM
New forms of scholarly creation  

A very good interview with Clifford Lynch in Syllabus on Academic Publishing in the Digital Realm, good if only because it acknowledges the importance of the web for new forms of scholarly creation, not just as an enhanced means of distributing traditional scholarly products.

Some nuggets:

We don't have great language to describe these things, and there is a lot of variability from one to the other because they have the nature of being individual acts of creativity that aren't firmly rooted in a multi-hundred year tradition - as printed works would be. Some of them have some of the characteristics of monographs, or encyclopedias, or databases, or interactive games or simulations - and you might see all of these kinds of threads woven into these works.

...

There are still very vexing issues in many disciplines about the scholarly legitimacy of these works. And what happens to a faculty member who has spent his or her time building these things - rather than writing monographs and journal articles - when tenure and promotion reviews come around? Part of this is that there is a peer review system that supports much of the traditional scholarly published literature, and that really isn't present with these new works in the majority of cases.

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I worry a lot that too many universities are pushing off some of the very hard work of faculty review and evaluation onto the peer review process rather than grappling with the content of the scholar's record, irrelevant of where it appeared and how it was produced.

Interesting comments about academic collaboration as well. Mirrors my perceptions of the way things are.

Indirectly via OLDaily: the Localizer sound dome.

Localizer Stereo Sound Dome makes it possible to hear startlingly clear stereo sounds without disturbing others nearby. While an individual is standing or sitting under the dome, the sound playing can be heard clearly. Individuals and employees standing away from the intended listening area only hear a small fraction of the sound playing. Once an individual steps out of the listening region, the sound level drops by over 80%.

What's this got to do with education? Lots: one of the most promising ideas in online ed is to use voiceovers to supplement online materials. There's strong research evidence to suggest that voice is a more efficient method of adding explanations, etc. to online materials than simple text; the latter competes with the visual aspects of the online materials for attention/comprehension, while audio (which appears to use a different short-term memory buffer in the brain) does not.

The problems (er .. "challenges"): producing the online voiceovers, and using them in multi-person environments - imagine the noise volume from a classroom of kids all at different places in a highly audio learning module. The former problem is being solved by text-to-speech technology; the Localizer and similar technologies may be a solution for the latter.

The voice of online learning could turn out to be very interesting indeed.

Note added Jan 31. It's been pointed out to me that headphones serve the same function, a fact I overlooked in my initial enthusiasm. I emailed a query re headphones to the company and got back:

.. Basically, the Localizer allows people to just approach a music source and hear it clearly without having to use headphones. The music is projected to a small zone and can not be heard a couple of feet away. This is perfect for "Listening Stations" applications where it is desirable to have a customer hear the CD or whatever, but not disturb others around them.

Er, yes ... . I am dis-enthused.

Well, mine certainly is. Not my physical desktop, my virtual one - my computer desktop. None the less, this article from the Economist resonates strongly.

For those of you who don't understand messy desktops, physical or otherwise, the point is this: what gets filed, gets forgotten. The stuff on my screen's desktop is stuff I need to take care of, answer, read sometime, print off, think about, look at and then trash without filing, access quickly this week but not always, remember to transfer to my notebook, email to somebody, or maybe cull and file every once and a while when things pile up. My desktop is organized in "plies, not files". I don't have to remember to do something if it's there in front of me when I scan 'round the screen.

The only flaw with this setup is windows. My choice is to leave them open to hog the desktop or minimize them into the dock, where of course, I'll forget to look at them. The solution to this used to be the Mac's windowshade function, which collapsed windows into a title bar - window title easy to read, window not hogging screen space, ideal. Apple chose to leave windowshading out of OS X, probably because it would deter users even more from using OS X's badly designed dock. Unsanity has a haxie which puts windowshading back into OS X, at the unacceptable price of crashing the computer almost every time it wakes up - sigh!

Don't tell me to get more organized - I am organized, dammit, just my way, and the last thing I need to do when I'm focussed on some task or other is try to remember where I filed something I need on my desktop now.

The DIM 2003 Calculator is an interactive widget to help students learn about dividing fractions. The intent is first to help them understand why "invert and multiply" works (through a "missing factor" approach), and then to provide opportunity for practice/consolidation. A prerequisite for using this widget is a clear understanding of fraction multiplication, including how to cancel factors before multiplication.